Monday, October 11, 2010

Log 5: I woke up the next morning in a small, brightly lit room with multiple drains in the floor. Then I heard a loud buzz, much like an alarm, and a small nozzle slid out of the wall. I looked at it for a moment, not sure what to expect. Then, a very tightly compressed stream of water shot out of it, directly at me. I tried to get up and found that my legs were bound to the floor with s set of chains. I held up my hand, deflecting the stream around me.

This was a very, very high-pressure stream. I have no doubt that if I had allowed it to hit me, it would have cut my flesh with great ease. Then, I heard a small whir from behind me. I turned my head to see another nozzle coming out from the wall. I help up my other hand, and stopped the stream before it exited the nozzle. I continued to hold back the stream until I heard a break, and the nozzle flew off with the force of a large rifle round, which I was just barely able to curve before it hit me. Now the water simply began to flood the room. Note that this whole time I was still holding back the first stream of water. I then applied the technique I used on the second nozzle on the first, and broke off the nozzle in this way.

Now that the water was simply flowing into the drain systems, I was able to focus on freeing my legs. I strained with the shackles until my hands began to grow numb. Then I tried freeing my legs with my new abilities. This did not work either, the shackles were too thick and heavy. That’s when I noticed the water was no longer draining, but slowly filling the room. A hole opened in the ceiling. A third nozzle protruded from the wall and fired at me. This time, I redirected the stream so it would hit my shackles. At first it did not seem to be doing anything (and I was becoming alarmed by the rapidly rising water level in the room, which was up past my ankles now) but slowly the metal began to chip and crack, finally giving way. Then, unexpectedly, the stream cut into my leg in the split-second it took me to adjust the stream onto the second shackle.

By the time I had freed myself, the water level in the room had reached my chest when sitting down. So I stood up and found that my leg was more severely injured than I had thought. I shifted my weight onto my other leg immediately, and tried to get a better look at the wound. It looked like a messy stab wound, which was very unnerving. This wound was the result of a stream of water hitting my leg for a split second. If my reaction had been much slower, I could have lost my leg easily. I forced open the drains along the floor, allowing the water to spill out. Then I focused on my leg, curious as to whether I could heal wounds with my new abilities. I tried pinching the wound together with one hand while forcing the tissues together with my mind (which hurt immensely) and meshing the skin together with my “free” hand (which also hurt immensely.) The fact that I had no medical experience whatsoever didn’t help.

What resulted was very ugly-looking but at least it wasn’t bleeding. I got up again and tried putting weight on it, and it still hurt to put weight on it. Effectively, I could not heal a wound with my abilities. At least, not yet. Perhaps I would discover some way to heal myself later on. It was during my thinking this that perhaps ten or twenty nozzles began pointing at me. And they all fired on me in short bursts, out of sync with one another.

It was impossible to stop each blast individually, they were much too hard to predict. So I lifted water out of the drain and made a thick dome of water around myself, allowing enough room inside to move around and breathe. For the most part, it worked. It dissipated the impacts rather well. Then I began methodically ripping the nozzles off. Eventually, they were all spouting water at a great rate. The drains remained open but they began to become filled up completely. Eventually the water level began to rise again and this time there was nowhere for the water to go but up. I let the water-shield down and propelled myself upward with a stream of water under my feet through the hole in the ceiling. It was hard to balance on the pillar of water at first but I managed.

It was dark inside the upward tunnel and it was perhaps 50 feet long. I finally ended up in an absolutely enormous room with no windows and no way in or out except for the way which I had just come in. This is what I thought at first. After a few seconds of observation I found that there was another entrance: a hole near the ceiling about 50 feet above me on the far end of the room, which in addition to being 50 feet tall was 200 feet wide and 400 feet long. The only way I could se myself getting up there was by using the water. So I waited for the water level to begin to rise, knowing full well that it would take a while. When the water was about 6 inches deep, there was a tremendous rumbling, and the walls on either side began to push inward at about 2 mi/h. So I quickly formulated and enacted a plan.

I pulled as much water as I could through the hole in the floor. Then, I began to run with my hands flying in wide vertical arcs on both sides, bringing the water behind me. By the time I began running, the room had shrunk to being only 100 feet wide. So my run became a sprint, and the water behind me quickly turned into a huge wave. I stopped 50 feet before the end of the room (at this point the room was only 20 feet wide) and let the wave I had created lift me up to the little hole near the ceiling.

I heard the walls pound together about 4 or 5 seconds after I reached the hole. I walked down the corridor the hole opened into until I reached the door. This time I opened it instead of ripping it away from the wall.

And inside I found the short man with the glasses and some of his colleagues. “Welcome, Mr. Octavian. Brilliant move creating a wave with the water. Most of our subjects don’t figure that part out.”

“What happens to them when they don’t figure it out?”

“Oh. We stop the walls of course, and they undergo a reversal surgery and are placed back into society.”

“So… When they fail, they get to leave?”

“Yes, they get to leave. Without any telekinesis or memory that any of this happened.”

“So… do they still get paid?”

“No. Why would we do that? They don’t have any memory of us, and therefore they never think to ask us for their payment. We don’t pay for failure because failure doesn’t pay.”

“How many of the patients make it as far as I have?”

“About 35%.”

“How many make it past the first part?”

“About half.”

“How many patients are there?”

“That’s enough questions for today, Mr. Octavian. Back to your room.”

I was getting used to this pattern. I pass some sort of test, I see the mysterious man with the glasses, I ask him questions, and when I ask one he doesn’t want to answer, he ends the discussion and gets his attendants to bring me back to my room. They’re keeping secrets. They know something they think I shouldn’t. I don’t like to be ignorant. Here’s one example… Just what WAS in that IV they were running into my arm the first time I woke up?